Comment on Review

Bamboo

(36)

3.9 out of 5 stars

Bamboo does more than just run builds and tests. It connects issues, commits, test results, and deploys so the whole picture is available to your entire product team- from project managers, to devs and testers, to sys admins.

It also has excellent support for Maven out of box, making it very easy to:

* configure build plans for projects that use Maven

* release codes that uses the Maven release plugin

There are also 3rd party add-ons you can use (for on-prem) for things it does not support out of box, or if you want, create your own add-ons.

What do you dislike?

Outside of Maven, its support for other build tools is not as good. Especially when it comes to making releases. Because it uses the maven-release plugin, there are some "magic" it uses, which is not available in other tools, and you will end up writing command line scripts to work around it to have the same result.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are using Atlassian products and Maven, Bamboo is the perfect CI/CD solution for you.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

End to end build automation and deploying to various environments with different configurations. Allows for a streamlined build, release, deploy cycle.

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What do you like best?

The basic build automation process, though not flashy, is probably the biggest win for us. One of the specific features we rely on is the ability for our Bamboo build process to parse Junit report outputs. We have written a number of validation tests that are executed during the validation portion of our builds. Note that that may not be novel from a software perspective, but we also have a number of configuration repositories against which we also run these validation steps to identify errors in the configuration and/or changes that should not have been made.

What do you dislike?

We work with a separate team responsible for the actual configuration and behind-the-scenes work, so from where we sit there are a few things that just "magically" work or fail horribly. Something that we have had difficulty with is parsing the captured output during the build process. Often we find stdout and stderr messages not being captured and viewable in the web interface. This usually results in "big stick" poking about to try to resolve the issue versus more targeted resolution that cleaner logs would allow.

Recommendations to others considering the product

We've really benefited from the Build Automation and CI/CD capabilities of Bamboo and it's integration with our Bitbucket and GitHub repositories. I recommend this for folks looking for a CI/CD solution.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We've seen a significant improvement in our ability to track and resolve build issues as well as managing build artifacts. Previously, we were relying on manual builds with moderate success. Being able to tie automation into our build process has really made a difference. We regularly utilize the "Latest Successful" build artifacts in our process and we've been able to avoid introducing errors on multiple occasions.

What do you like best?

Bamboo has a painless installation process, helpful quick-start guide, simple build configuration, and seamless integration with JIRA. Bamboo supports builds in any programming language using any build tool, including Ant, Maven, Make, and any command-line tools. Polling strategy can be easily configured and scheduled. It comes with configuration templates like ANT, Bundler and so on.

Support provided is real good and integrates with other IDEs easily.

What do you dislike?

Does come with lesser plugins and its not very flexible. Bamboo is really limited for a modern day tool, that too for a CI tool, where things aren't done from scratch.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are already using Atlassian products like Jira, stash, Confluence etc, then it makes sense to use Bamboo. Bamboo will integrate closely with other products in Atlassian ecosystem.

Installation of java prior to setting up of bamboo is required, going through documentation could be helpful.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I required to a tool to ensure that whenever code is committed to the repository, new changes integrate well into the existing code base and build, unit tests and integration tests are performed. Bamboo did all this

What do you like best?

Easily configurable for project granularity. For example, I can define the relevant git repository's branch to a build project/job, provide the necessary build tasks with lots of different executables and scripts, and segregate the build from the release stage with parallel jobs for only specific users or groups. Lots of popular language integrations with multiple notification methods and great integration with other Atlassian products.

What do you dislike?

Free only for first 7 days (as of June 25, 2015), although for only $10/mo for 10 jobs for 1 remote agent, it's a solid option for those ready to use enterprise-ready tools like Bamboo and its brothers and sisters of Atlassian products. I hope that there becomes a greater focus for mobile applications.

Recommendations to others considering the product

For enterprise ready Continuous Integration tool, Bamboo is a great choice paired with other Atlassian products.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Fast and contiguous partitioning of build and deployment tasks. Bamboo is a chiefly a continuous integration tool, but it does great in assisting with deployment issues and segregating build tasks to allow you to debug your code. Automated merging of branches is also a great feature.

What do you like best?

The integrations with the other Atlassian tools (BitBucket, JIRA, and Confluence) work with no effort, right out of the box.

The ability to set fine-grain access control for the deployment phase for each target environment is great. As a public company, being subject to SOX compliance requirements means things such as segregation of duties (no developers deploying to PROD if the application can influence financial reporting). My developers have access to deploy via Bamboo to DEV, but a release engineer can only deploy to PROD.

What do you dislike?

The configuration of authentication against an LDAP source (such as AD) is a bit clunky compared to the other Atlassian tools. It requires you to configure the user directory source via config files without much direction compared to JIRA and Confluence which you can do it right in the web interface. Even myself being a CLI guy and coder, I would still prefer they were consistent with the other tools.

One big feature that Bamboo is missing is the ability to create a git tag after a successful build against trunk (which is basically a release candidate). Jenkins has this feature out of the box from what I have read. There isn't even a plugin available on the marketplace to do this.

One feature I wish it had is tight integration with Ansible for the deployment phase. Right now I just use a script task for deployment which calls the Ansible playbook to execute the complex, multi-tier deployment with rolling upgrades. Ansible requires SSH authN to the target nodes; if I use the out of the box SSH plugin in Bamboo, I can store the private key within Bamboo, even with a passphrase. If I run Ansible as a script task for the deployment, I can't use the SSH key/passphrase feature of bamboo.

Recommendations to others considering the product

The price is reasonable and well worth it if you already an Atlassian customer using their other tools and want the integration. Jenkins may be enough if you don't care about the integrations.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Consistent builds and automated deployment to all environments (DEV/UAT/PROD). Continuous Deployment in DEV, and push-button deployment in non-DEV by a release engineer (due to segregation of duties requirements). 0 manual steps required other than pushing the button for the deployment.

What do you like best?

What I like best about Bamboo is the nice user interface and how easy it is to use and understand.

What do you dislike?

One thing that I think they could improve on is easier integration with other tools like HipTest.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I recommend you compare this product to other like it and decide what best works for you. I like that Bamboo is easy to use and looks nice from a user's point-of-view.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

My company uses Bamboo to build upon commits to our Bitbucket repository, run unit tests and deploy to our various test, staging, and production environments. To have Bamboo build our projects after each commit and run the unit tests allows us to catch bugs early on to save time and money. This benefits our developers, QA analysts, and the company as a whole.

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